According to the prior art, flexible flat articles or objects, particularly printed products, are wound or rolled to form tubular packs for transportation purposes. During the same winding process, the packs are conventionally provided with a protective and holding element in the form of a paper sheet or a plastic sheet portion. Depending on the scale formation and on the winding process, the articles of the scale flow formation can or cannot be removable from the inside of the pack. For many applications, it is advantageous to roll the scale flow in such a way that the pack does not need to be "opened", in the true sense of the term, in order to permit removing individual articles. The protective and holding element is in this case not destroyed and the scale formation is not pushed together to form a stack. In addition to the advantage of the time and costs saved by the removal from the interior of the pack, the articles are also protected for a longer period against external influences such as wet and dirt by means of the still-intact protective and holding element.
Methods and apparatus for producing such packs are described, for example, in the publications EP-243 906 (U.S. Pat. No. 4,811,548) and U.S. Pat. No. 5,022,523, in which packs for removing individual articles from the center cavity are described, and in U.S. Pat. No. 5,101,610, in which a pack is described from which no individual articles can be removed. Furthermore in the publication EP-474 999 (U.S. application Ser. No. 08/069,019), a method and apparatus for the handling of such packs are described.
If, in addition to the articles, e.g. printed products, contained in the rolled pack in scale formation form, the pack is to contain additional information relating to the complete pack or the printed products contained therein, this can be simply printed on the protective and holding element or, if the latter is transparent, can be wrapped directly under that element.
Although this can be easily carried out during the production process, it suffers from the disadvantage that the carrier of the additional information can only be separated from the pack when the protective and holding element is removed, i.e. for a pack from which the articles are removed individually, only when the final printed product has been removed. If the carrier of the additional information is, e.g., a kiosk poster, this is not acceptable, because such a poster must naturally be displayed before the printed products are offered for sale, i.e. possibly at a moment when the pack is still intact.